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Wednesday, October 1, 2014

The Infantilization Of The American Female

Some years ago, Kim Du Toit, at one time a very active conservative blogger, wrote a widely-circulated essay provocatively titled "The Pussification of the Western Male." In it he addressed the social and political trends that had shorn Western Man of...well, of his manhood. The reaction to the essay was widespread, and all but uniformly strongly positive. It was clear that Du Toit had struck a nerve -- that a great many men were aware of what had occurred among them, and were more than a little displeased by it.

Women have been warned in a Planned Parenthood Action Fund email that Alaska Republican Dan Sullivan, who is running for the U.S. Senate, and three other GOPs could “affect their sex lives.”

The warning came from Lena Dunham, the creator and start of the HBO series Girls. In the email Dunham urged women to remember Thom Tillis, who’s challenging Sen. Kay Hagan (D) in North Carolina, “stuck a bunch of abortion restrictions into a bill that was supposed to be about motorcycle safety.”

She also wrote that Joni Ernst, a Republican from Iowa running for the Senate who made hog castration (cutting pork) the focus of her first advertising campaign, “has tried to block women from getting…what they need at Planned Parenthood health clinics.”

Dunham wrote that Rep. Cory Gardner (R-Colo.), who is running for the seat of Sen. Mark Udall (D-Colo.), “is all about letting your boss tell you what kind of birth control your insurance should cover.”

But the worst, as far as Dunham sees it, is Sullivan of Alaska, “who just outright refuses to reveal whether he supports the Violence Against Women Act.”

Planned Parenthood is wrapping itself around Dunham’s email, telling women to vote like their sex lives depended on it.

The organization included a quote from Dunham in another of its recent emailings: “I vote because the number of backwards, out-of-touch, downright freaking unbelievably anti-women’s health politicians out there right now makes my blood boil. The crazy and depressing truth is that there are people running for office right now who could actually affect your life. PARTICULARLY your sex life. PARTICULARLY if you’re a woman.”

In effect, Dunham, and Planned Parenthood, have reduced women's interests -- politically, at least -- to the sensations in their pudenda...and, doubt it not, the "right" to kill what might issue from them lest it inconvenience their pursuit of those sensations. This "woman" is indistinguishable from a four-year-old girl rubbing her own pubic mound and cooing at the neat feelings it produces.

Planned Parenthood, an organization that sells abortions and contraceptives, has an obvious pecuniary interest in infantilizing women this way. Lena Dunham, who purveys soft-core porn on HBO, has an equally obvious interest. But what about women generally? Do they approve of being treated like toddlers uninterested in anything but enjoying those neat feelings from their genitals?

Perhaps we shall see this coming November.

Women's attitudes are, of course, not uniform. They vary by age, by locale, by occupation, by religious affiliation, and no doubt by the proximity of the nearest Nordstrom's or Bloomingdale's. In at least one regard, men's attitudes are somewhat more uniform: nearly all of us crave sexual access to the woman of our choice.

Sexual access isn't the only thing men value in women, of course, but it is sufficiently constant a feature of our relationships with them that women cannot help but respond to it. Let's pass in silence over the gradations in women's responses to men's sex drives. In some cases they're sincere, in others, manipulative and exploitative, and in many others a blend of the two. The salient point is that evolution has compelled women, simply because they are women, to make the male sex drive an important factor in their attitudes and responses to men.

The Sexual Revolution of the late Twentieth Century, with its manic insistence on Orgasms Uber Alles, promoted sex from being just one of the factors in male-female relations to The Big Kahuna, eclipsing all else. Anything that might somehow interfere with sexual pleasure, including marriage, marital fidelity, procreation, and epidemiological concerns, was anathematized. In combination with the numerous concurrent encouragements to women to wallow in their sexual natures, this gave rise to the hypersexualized culture we "enjoy" today.

Not all women reacted in the same fashion, nor to the same degree. The most enthusiastic embracers of unbridled sexuality were coastal women, most especially single women in white-collar trades that afford them the time, money, and energy that make it possible to indulge themselves. That locale includes women in media...and the corporate hierarchies that view women as their preferred market space.

In short, sexual liberation, coupled to the ever-operating profit motive, gave rise to the state of affairs in which, if Lena Dunham isn't regarded as the icon of contemporary Western womanhood, at the very least her views receive respectful consideration from a substantial minority of women. That minority acts as a relay and reinforcement mechanism for Dunham's Vulval Gospel. If it votes en bloc, that minority is capable of swaying many an election -- and the attitudes of that minority of men to whom getting a gal's pants off is the supreme achievement of existence.

I believe it was the great Mark Steyn who coined the phrase "demography is destiny." (At the very least, he's responsible for popularizing it.) If its demographics don't wholly predetermine the course of a society, they're surely one of the most important of all the factors that bias it. The demographics of these United States are currently trending in -- from the vantage point of the Sexual (E)Missionaries -- an unmistakably retrograde direction.

The key factors are two:

The aging-out of the huge Baby Boom Generation, among which the Sexual Revolution was inseminated;

The shift in population from the coastal states to the "heartland," with the accompanying shift in attitudes.

Sex is obviously less of a driver for the decisions and actions of the aged than for those of the young. Beyond that, as population flows from regions of higher density to regions of lower density, the social mechanisms that promote acquaintanceships that can flower into sexual contact weaken. More, the "anonymity of the crowd" phenomenon tends not to operate in low-density regions; more people, by number and percentage, are likely to know what you've been doing, and with whom. These things are slowly but steadily dampening the enthusiasm of American women for casual, promiscuous, and non-procreative sex.

It's no coincidence that as this shift has solidified, the media conglomerates who've "done a corner" in nudging women toward consequence-free sex and its accoutrements have pushed their marketing out to the "demographic margins:" younger and younger Americans as yet untutored in the consequences of heedless indulgence, and women entering their "senior years" who have, by dint of a poor choice of spouse or poor behavior while married, are getting there unmated and are unhappy about it. It should require no great amount of explanation that such a reorientation is only a temporary holding action. Nevertheless, profit-seeking entities will seek profit, regardless of how long the game can continue. Corporate moguls are as aware as you and I that nothing lasts forever.

The pressures that have infantilized so many American women will continue to operate, albeit on shrinking demographic cohorts. Outside those cohorts, the slow return to maturity and saner relations between the sexes will proceed. If there's a Last Graf other than "Mother, guard your daughters, and your divorced mother too," I can't imagine what it should be.

2 comments:

dan
said...

The most illustrative part of the essay - especially for those opposing this cultural direction - is the following:"if Lena Dunham isn't regarded as the icon of contemporary Western womanhood, at the very least her views receive respectful consideration from a substantial minority of women."We need to make sure Lena Dunham - the Park Avenue Princess, Mayflower baby, chosen face of the elite's war on tradition - is THE icon people associate with that movement. Younger, homely women may associate with her, but the ugliness that emanates from her in every sense can be used to turn the masses away if we can put her in contrast with truly beautiful people who oppose her brand of feminism.

Show Lena Dunham, and then show the Duck Dynasty women. Show Lena Dunham, then show the Duggar daughters. Show Lena Dunham, then show Lila Rose. Show Lena Dunham, then Candace Cameron.

Compare and contrast and ask people to choose - the... genetically handicapped daughter of elitist America, or the bright, shining faces of women from traditional, happy families where respect for life, American culture, and the Christian faith are taught.

The mainstream media won't do the heavy lifting on this, and will attempt to sponge off the brighter lights without allowing them to speak their minds. But the continued media fragmentation makes that less and less powerful a force every year.

Yes, as Emily Ratajkowski puts it, feminism is about being able to, "wear what she wants, sleep with whom she wants, and dance how she wants" In short, freedom from responsibility. Great post as always, Mr. Porretto.